By Ben Edmonds

Detroit Free Press Special Writer

‘The Complete LHI Recordings’

The name Honey Ltd. will be recognized by only the most dedicated record collectors, those who might have spent upwards of $2,000 for a copy of the Detroit vocal group’s exceedingly rare 1968 album. Yet during their short career, the four women who made up Honey Ltd. got to sample a lot of life and shared experiences that eluded many groups that found far more success.

With reissue specialists Light in the Attic Records planning a Tuesday release of a Honey Ltd. collection, “The Complete LHI Recordings,” it’s a good time to revisit a story you’ve probably never heard.

The quartet — Laura Polkinghome, Marsha Jo Temmer and sisters Alexandra and Joan Sliwin — grew out of mid-1960s lunchtime sing-alongs in the cafeteria at Wayne State University. Polkinghome displayed a knack for songwriting, Temmer was a talented choreographer and all four members contributed to a distinctive and alluring vocal blend.

They attracted the attention of Punch Andrews, who dubbed them the Mama Cats and showcased them in his Hideout clubs and other venues on Michigan’s hyperactive teen club circuit. They were usually backed by the Mushrooms, the band fronted by Glenn Frey, a future founding member of the Eagles. The Mama Cats’ single for Hideout Records was written by Bob Seger and recorded with his band. The girls returned the favor by contributing vocals to Seger’s “Heavy Music” and “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man.”

Then at the beginning of 1968 — with almost no preparation — the Mama Cats set out for Los Angeles. At the members’ very first appointment on the Left Coast, they wowed Lee Hazlewood, the writer-producer behind Nancy Sinatra’s string of mid-’60s hits. Hazlewood signed the group to his LHI label, renamed the foursome Honey Ltd. and set about the business of grooming and polishing. He retained publicists and photographers, hired the finest session musicians and arrangers, bought splashy trade ads and secured national television exposure on variety shows hosted by Andy Williams, Joey Bishop and Jerry Lewis.

The first couple of Honey Ltd. singles failed to burn up the charts, however, and with larger business realities closing in at LHI, the fairy tale began to unravel. The group’s management decided Honey Ltd. should abandon its airy (but still Detroit-grounded) psych-pop sound in favor of fare better suited to Las Vegas, where members soon found themselves opening for Eddie Fisher.

“They gave us top hats and those disappearing canes that fold up,” says Alex Sliwin, who remains, after all these years, bemused and somewhat disgusted by the experience.

What was to have been a breakthrough appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in the spring of 1969 ultimately turned into Honey Ltd’s swan song. The group wanted to use the Sullivan gig to launch its new recording of hot young songwriter Laura Nyro’s “Eli’s Coming.” Management, however, insisted on a clichéd Vegas routine and utterly wasted the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Alex Sliwin had exited the group before the Ed Sullivan debacle. (The group used a stand-in blond for the TV appearance.) The rest of Honey Ltd. called it a day soon afterward, leaving Three Dog Night to turn “Eli’s Coming” into a hit later that year.

Today, Sliwin says she found just one part of her brush with showbiz memorable: In December 1968, Honey Ltd. accompanied Bob Hope on a USO tour of Vietnam at the height of the war there. Group members, who had recently recorded the antiwar tune “The Warrior,” suddenly came to understand Vietnam from a human perspective.

“I will never be able to forget the sea of beautiful faces I saw at our shows,” Sliwin says, “knowing that many of them would go out the next day and never return.”

The experience didn’t necessarily change her antiwar views, but it led her to become a dedicated supporter of the Vietnam Veterans of America and other veterans groups.

Though the dream didn’t come true for Honey Ltd. and its members are now scattered across the country, the women remain close.

“We’ve managed to stay good friends — maybe it’s just a girl thing,” says Sliwin from her home in Florida, where she performs with sister Joan as Like Honey. Temmer has devoted herself to charitable work over the years. And Polkinghome, known since the ’70s by married name Laura Creamer, has lent her stellar vocal support to Billy Joel, Kid Rock and many others. She’s currently on tour with Seger, continuing a professional association that has lasted through the decades.

The reissue of the Honey Ltd. material has caught all four women by surprise. None of them ever even owned a copy of the group’s 1968 album, a disc that is “a holy grail to collectors,” according to John Dixon, a Phoenix record collector and Lee Hazlewood scholar.

“It was so rare that there was some question as to whether it had actually been released at all,” Dixon says. “LHI changed distributors four times, so there were a lot of cracks for a record to fall through. But you only have to look at the work Light in the Attic has done with the (Detroit folk musician) Rodriguez catalog to realize that the Honey Ltd. record is in good hands.”